I Survived a Campus Shooting

In the past 10 years, at least 78 people have been killed by gunfire on 27 college campuses, and many states are trying to make it easier to bring weapons to school. Survivors of one of the nation's most notorious school shootings tell how it really feels when guns come to class.

Maria Ruiz-Santana sat watching the clock in her oceanography class at Northern Illinois University, hoping time would speed up. "Ten more minutes," she whispered to a friend. It was 3:05 p.m. on Valentine's Day in 2008. That's when time slowed down.

A 27-year-old gunman burst through a door at the front of the room, beneath the clock Ruiz-Santana was watching. Wearing a black shirt with the word Terrorist across the chest, he carried a sawed-off shotgun, three handguns, and eight loaded magazines. Ruiz-Santana, a junior, saw only the shotgun, which looked to her like a long pole. Her mind didn't have time to register that it was a weapon — she had already been hit. "I felt pressure on my left shoulder, then everything went numb," she says today, sitting in the student center on the campus where she was shot. "I remember seeing lights in the ceiling. Then I realized I was on the floor. I could see the bottoms of chairs. I thought, What's going on?"

The shooter, a graduate of the school named Steven Kazmierczak, sprayed shotgun pellets across the class — 120 students — in Cole Hall. People sprinted toward exits or hid between seats; a few sat frozen. The gunman paused, and some students noticed the opportunity to flee, shouting, "He's reloading!" He resumed firing with the shotgun, then switched to a semiautomatic pistol, marching up and down the room.

Ruiz-Santana, lying on the floor with shots to her face, neck, and chest, struggled to make sense of what was happening. "I heard noises — bam, bam, bam," she says, "but my brain wasn't processing it."

Authorities received the first 911 call at 3:06 p.m. Campus police raced to the scene. In the meantime, the shooter turned the gun on himself, committing suicide at the front of the room. He had taken five young lives with him — Gayle Dubowski, Catalina Garcia, Julianna Gehant, Ryanne Mace, and Daniel Parmenter. He had injured 21 others, some seriously.

Ruiz-Santana tasted blood and realized she was lying in a pool of it. "I saw my roommate leaning over me," she says. "She was crying and talking on the phone. Then she was gone." A realization came into focus: She was dying. I don't think I can survive this, she thought. There was no life flashing before her eyes, no rush of memories. Just a vague, confused sense of I'm done.

As it turned out, she wasn't done. The chief of campus police, Donald Grady, rushed to her side. He elevated her feet, she says, "to keep the blood flowing to my core — I was losing so much blood." Those crucial moments with Grady would change the course of her life in a profound way. Inspired by the actions of her rescuer, Ruiz-Santana is now a police officer at the same school where she nearly lost her life. It's her job to protect students at Northern Illinois University.

As both a survivor of gun violence and a campus police officer, Ruiz-Santana — who is sharing her life story for the first time — is at the center of a debate that is roaring across colleges and courts: whether people should be allowed to carry concealed weapons on campus. Gun-rights proponents argue that schools would be safer if students could carry weapons for protection. Their opponents argue the opposite — that the weapons would lead to more deaths.

Twitter throbs with talk of college shootings and lockdowns, and several times this year, the rumors have been true. In just one week last January, there were shootings at Widener University in Pennsylvania, Purdue University in Indiana, and South Carolina State University. Two people were killed.

Today, 21 states, including Illinois, ban concealed weapons on college campuses, while 23 states leave the decision up to the college. Six states have provisions allowing concealed weapons on campus, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Those states are Colorado, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, Utah, and Wisconsin. (Arkansas has a law, but it applies only to faculty and colleges can opt out.)

The political battle is growing: Last year, at least 19 states introduced laws to allow concealed weapons on campus in some regard, according to the NCSL. Two of the bills passed, in Arkansas and Kansas. On the other hand, five states introduced legislation to prohibit concealed weapons on campus. None of those bills passed.

"We're in a huge fight right now," says Andy Pelosi, director of the Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus. "There's so much going on in the states." He is trying to rally students and faculty to get involved. So is Kurt Mueller, the director of public relations of an opposing group, Students for Concealed Carry. "Students are key," Mueller says. "For all social movements, students are major pieces of the puzzle."

While Ruiz-Santana lay bleeding on the classroom floor, she heard the deep voice of the campus police chief in her ear. "He was asking me what seemed like weird questions, like how many brothers and sisters I have," she says. He was trying to get her talking, to keep her brain in action. It worked. She hung on. "I don't remember the [helicopter] ride to the hospital," she says. But she does recall "feeling really cold, shivering, and the doctors cutting my clothes — my favorite jeans — and my bracelets from my relatives in Mexico."

At the hospital, she woke up unable to move or speak, with a neck brace and tubes everywhere, one down her throat. "I was tied down in case I woke up and freaked out," she says. "My mom held my hand and told me it was okay." She wasn't even able to scratch her own nose.

Surgery to her esophagus and trachea followed, splitting open her neck and chest down to her stomach. She drifted in and out of consciousness for days. "I couldn't speak, eat, or swallow," she recalls. "My vocal cords were damaged, and I didn't know if I would talk again. I had shotgun pellets in my body and in my face. I felt so uncomfortable. I thought,I need to get better to get away from this."

After about a week, she saw her face, riddled with pellets, in the mirror for the first time. She knew to expect those marks but was surprised by the size of the surgical gash on her neck. "I thought, I'm going to learn how to live with it. I'm still learning how to live with it."

Her family wouldn't allow her to watch the news. She learned from her brother that other students had died, including two friends, Ryanne Mace and Catalina Garcia. "I had seen Ryanne that day at the start of class, sitting all the way at the front, and waved," she says. "And Cathy had been sitting with me in class."

Her family helped her cope, her parents never leaving her side. She was driven by thoughts of returning to school, where she had been studying criminology, considering a career in the FBI. "I thought,I have goals I want to achieve," she says. "Nothing was going to prevent me from getting that done." The doctors told her she was recuperating well, and one day, she realized she could speak, her voice coming out in a squeak.

She was released within two weeks, still connected to a feeding tube. She went home to a house surrounded by reporters but didn't feel like talking. "I just wanted to get better," she says. She started physical therapy and voice therapy and went to counseling with her family.

Around two months after the shooting, she returned to school. She asked Grady, the campus police chief, if he would take her to the scene of the crime. "I think it was part of closure for me," she says. "I wanted to know what had happened." Entering the room where she was shot, she was intrigued but nervous. "This is where we found you," Grady told her. Later, he offered her an internship with the campus police. "Seeing the officers interact with students ... I really liked that," she says. A new future began to take shape.

Gabriela Herman

As she describes her experience, it's a crisp Sunday morning at NIU. The campus, a leafy sprawl of lakes and bridges in DeKalb, a city in the midst of cornfields, is quiet. More ducks are wandering the grounds than people. Students are sleeping off the parties of the night before, when the football team beat a state rival.

At 26 years old, petite in a white top and jeans, her dark hair pulled up, Ruiz-Santana still looks like a student herself. But she is now Officer Maria, one of a handful of women on a force of dozens. In her first year on the job, she met and fell in love with a DeKalb police officer while helping the police with some Spanish translating. The two married in 2013 and had a baby girl, Alexis. It's a juggle, she says. She works nights, and her husband works days. The pregnancy worried her because there is lead in her veins from the shotgun pellets. "I didn't want my baby to be born with lead in her blood," she says, gazing at her daughter, sleeping in a carrier by her side. To her relief, the child is fine.

Some six years after the attack, shotgun pellets still lie beneath Ruiz-Santana's skin. She points to the inside of her arm, where two pellets have worked their way up from her wrist to the middle of her arm over the years. There's one in her forehead that hurts when she bumps it. Her neck bears a pink scar from surgery. "Sometimes the students ask me about it," she says, loosening a bright patterned scarf. "I'm kind of proud of it."

No one knows for sure why Kazmierczak chose Valentine's Day. If the chosen date was a quest for notoriety, Ruiz-Santana says, he failed. She doesn't remember his name and doesn't care to. "People say his name, and I'm like, who? My brain automatically blocks it."

Fellow survivor Unnum Rahman, 25, says she doesn't remember the shooter's name either. She escaped the classroom plastered with shotgun pellets — one embedded in the corner of her right eye. She recalls fleeing from the room so pumped with adrenaline that she didn't know she had been shot. "I didn't feel pain or anything," she says. Outside the building, on the snow-covered campus, she realized her arms and face were covered with blood. Students stared at her, stunned, when she said, "Help me!"

The shotgun pellet remained lodged in her eye for six months, until doctors felt they could safely remove it. But she was back at school within two weeks. "I wanted to come back — I didn't want to feel afraid," she says. Her sight is intact, but her eye is constantly dilated and she wears colored contacts to deal with sensitivity to light. She carries shotgun pellets under the skin of her face, scalp, and arm. A few pellets had worked their way out after the shooting, popping out of her skin. She laughs about the weirdness of that.

Walking the campus, she and another survivor, Emily Mayberry, 26, chat and laugh about their college years, reminiscing about a gargoyle statue that had its head stolen. Both were sophomores at the time of the shooting, but they didn't know each other.

Later, Rahman points to a round bump on the back of her hand — a shotgun pellet. Mayberry looks at it and suddenly gives her a hug. "Wow, girl," she says.

Mayberry has different remnants of the attack — mental snapshots of the shooter walking across the campus that morning. "He had a big long trench coat on and a guitar case. I looked at him, but he was not making eye contact," she says. "He was walking like a zombie. He had a really dark energy. I got a very bad feeling." But it was just a feeling, and she shook it off. That afternoon, she was cutting through Cole Hall on her way to a class when she heard gunshots and screaming. She bolted, yelling at students to run, and ran for two miles herself, finally stopping at a Burger King in DeKalb. "The sensation lasted for a long time after I stopped — I felt like I was still running," she says.

Back at school after the shooting, both she and Rahman jumped whenever they heard loud noises or slamming doors, especially in class. Mayberry couldn't look at Cole Hall for weeks. Finally, she decided, I'm going to walk right up to it. Sobbing, she taped a poem to the wall. "After that, I made myself look at the building every day," she says. "He wanted people to be fearful, for us to think of him. I think of the people who died, not him."

The shooter had a history of mental illness, attempting suicide in his youth, according to a report commissioned by NIU. After high school, his parents sent him to a mental institution, where he was given medication for schizoaffective disorder, which can involve paranoid delusions. A couple of years later, in 2001, he joined the military but was discharged for hiding his history of mental illness. In 2002, he enrolled at NIU, and his life stabilized. He got a girlfriend and excelled in sociology and criminology, attending classes in Cole Hall and graduating in 2006.

Kazmierczak started graduate studies at NIU, then transferred to the University of Illinois when he felt NIU was de-emphasizing criminology. He reportedly took this personally. By then, his life was unraveling, as was his mental state. His mother had died. He had broken up with his girlfriend. He started buying weapons from local gun shops, legally.

If his military discharge had been dishonorable, he couldn't have bought guns legally, but the discharge was uncharacterized, according to the NIU report. He also faced mental-health and criminal-background checks, but his history of mental illness reportedly didn't show up. The FBI database includes only those who have been committed to a mental institution by a court order (Kazmierczak had gone voluntarily) or are currently institutionalized. States can pass stronger laws and Illinois had done so, but the law wasn't broad enough to flag him.

Today, Illinois has one of the strictest background-check laws in the nation. Under a law passed last summer, mental-health providers must report patients who pose a danger to themselves or others, with those patients going into a database for background checks. Illinois also mandates that private gun sellers and licensed gun dealers alike do checks. That goes far beyond federal law — in an infamous loophole, there is no FBI background check on private sales, whether at gun shows, between acquaintances, or via classifieds online. In another loophole, federal law says a person must be 21 to buy a handgun from a licensed dealer but only 18 to buy a rifle or shotgun from a dealer or to buy a handgun in a private transaction.

At the same time Illinois tightened mental-health checks, the state made it legal for people to carry concealed weapons — the last state to do so, meaning all 50 states now allow it. Mueller from Students for Concealed Carry argues that if people can carry weapons in a state, then they have a right to carry them on campuses. "We're not trying to change who can carry but where they can carry," he says. "We're interested in protecting the rights of people who already have permits. Campuses are no different than cities — they are cities. There is no logical argument to be made that campuses should be treated differently." For college women, he argues, concealed guns might be used to protect against sexual assault.

Pelosi at Keep Guns Off Campus has the opposite view: that allowing concealed weapons on campus puts students at increased risk. "Students are under such pressure — with their studies, with drugs and alcohol. Introducing loaded weapons on campus is a disaster," he says. "The average person with a concealed-weapon permit does not have the proper training for responding to an active shooter scenario. And these are high-risk years for suicide. We should be thinking about how to reduce risk, not increase it." A 2013 study at Ball State University found that many students agree. In a survey of 15 public universities in the Midwest, 78 percent of students said they do not want concealed handguns on campus.

Mary Kay Mace, who lost her daughter, Ryanne, in the NIU shooting, has committed herself to gun-violence prevention. She says the federal government needs to "grow a spine" and strengthen background checks. "Opponents argue that if people can't get a gun legally, they can get one illegally. But why make it easy for them?" Her daughter, she says, wanted to become a therapist. "Had she known the gunman, she would have reached out. She would've tried to help."

In a quiet garden in front of Cole Hall, five stone markers in a semicircle bear the names of the students who died and the words Forward, Together, Forward,from the school fight song. A sculpture with five flames towers overhead. Mayberry and Rahman walk up to the memorial, and their mood visibly turns, their laughter from moments earlier fading away. They talk about how the shooting changed their lives.

Mayberry, who works at a juice bar and vegan café in nearby Arlington Heights, says she went to trauma therapy a couple of years after the tragedy. "The noise, the shots, the people, not being able to help them ... it haunted me," she says. "I decided, I don't want to live like this. I'm not going to be a victim." The therapy helped tremendously, she says, noting that she has become more spiritual. Also, due to the bad vibe she felt when she saw the gunman before his spree, she will never ignore her gut again. "I always listen now," she says. "I trust what it tells me."

Rahman, who works in nearby Elk Grove Village as a broker for grocery stores — helping food get to shelves — says she feels unsafe when she thinks about people carrying concealed weapons. "Why do you need to allow people to carry guns wherever they want?" she asks. But the shooting has also made her live life to the fullest. "I could have died," she says. "Now, if I want to do something, I do it. I don't want to regret not doing anything."

Neither woman has been in Cole Hall since the shooting. "Maybe one day," Rahman says with a sigh. Officials debated tearing down the building, but "ultimately, the decision was made to renovate it, to continue on, to adapt and change," says Kelly Wesener Michael, associate vice president for student affairs and dean of students.

Ruiz-Santana, standing in Cole Hall with her baby in her carrier, says she has mixed views about allowing concealed weapons on campus. Whether weapons are allowed or not, she says, violent crime can happen. "The problem is the person who handles the weapon, not the weapon itself," she says. She supports stringent background checks and extensive training for gun owners, noting how she loves to practice shooting for her job.

She speaks matter-of-factly about how the classroom shooting reshaped her life. "It happened. You've got to move on," she says. "I had my moments when I would start crying, thinking, Why did this happen to me? But why waste my time feeling bad about myself or angry about the guy who shot me? I'm alive and healthy. I heard about students dropping out or transferring — that's not going to make you forget. I see my scars. I remember it every single day. I am never going to forget."

Gabriela Herman

This article was originally published as "I Survived a Campus Shooting" in the April 2014 issue of Cosmopolitan. Click here to get the issue in the iTunes store!

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